With the development of Internet technologies, functions of a network device become more and more abundant. Therefore, monitoring of a network becomes increasingly essential.
At present, the network device monitors the network by analyzing and monitoring traffic and a packet. Different network devices have different emphases during packet processing, and support different bandwidths. Therefore, a cluster usually needs to be formed during deployment, to satisfy packet processing requirements through assistance among network devices in analysis.
During a process of implementing the present invention, the inventor finds that:
In the foregoing deployment pattern, an application scenario may occur, that is, one packet needs to be transferred to multiple network devices in a same cluster in sequence, where each network device in the cluster has a specific analysis and processing function, and then the same packet needs to be diverted between the network devices in the same cluster. The diversion refers to a process that one network device gives a packet to another network device for processing, and the other network device returns the packet after the processing is completed. However, in the prior art, there is no technical solution for packet diversion yet.